Miss Webster and Chérif Page 2

  ‘Whoops-a-daisy.’

  The men were gentle, unperturbed.

  ‘Let’s get you to hospital, dear, and make you more comfortable.’

  Dr Humphreys locked the back door, shut down the central heating and turned out all the lights.

  The lights never seemed to go out in the hospital. Alarmingly, the ward was mixed. Men to the right, women to the left. They were cordoned off in bays of four beds, islands of white separated by green plastic armchairs and yellow screens. She awoke attached to a floating bottle, suspended by invisible wires, three feet above her head. The nurses looked at the clipboard attached to her iron cage, but not at her. NIL BY MOUTH. She saw this sign hanging upside down on the bed next to her and twitched, irrationally pleased that she could still read, albeit like Alice, from the other side of the glass. Somewhere, far away, she heard voices. But on the whole the ward resembled a silent film, played out in unfocused shots with an alarming zoom for close-ups and much repetition. The doctors touched her wrist, her forehead. The nurses issued endearments and instructions.

  ‘I’m just going to take a little bit of blood, dear.’

  ‘Can you hear me, dear? If you can, move your eyes to the left. Ooh yes. Aren’t you the clever one? Now to the right.’ A pencil torch shone directly into her shrinking pupils.

  ‘Left again.’

  She closed her eyes. Someone patted her hand. She felt belittled, patronised. She began to worry about her house. Who would water her plants? Thank God the cat was dead. It had been dead for years. She groaned slightly. The patronising voice was immediately present, as if she had set off a recorded message.

  ‘Are you in pain, dear? Squeeze my hand if you are.’

  Elizabeth Webster opened both eyes and glared at the blue mass topped with a blurred white label. Staff Nurse Something or Other. Piss off, she snarled. But all that came out was a burr, burr, burr, deep in her chest.

  Another voice said, ‘I’ll arrange for the brain scan to be brought forward.’

  Elizabeth Webster heard someone chanting.

  This man hath penance done

  And penance more will do.

  Then the boat drifted out of reach on to an immense shelf of darkness.

  She lay beached on a coral shelf. A huge machine purred all around her, the note changed to a gentle hum, the lights scorched her eyeballs. She saw the reflection of red – red sky, red dunes, red sand. She had crash-landed in a desert. There were no other passengers.

  ‘Is there anyone we can ring, dear? To let them know where you are.’

  ‘Do you have any family?’

  They always ask the same fucking questions. Où est votre mari? Où sont vos enfants? As if you couldn’t conduct your life without assistance from either one or the other. A small fast car, driven by a youth convinced of his immortality, had smashed into her on a hill in Normandy. They were all scraped up by the pompiers, who had asked exactly the same questions, over and over again. Où habitez-vous? Où est votre mari? Où sont vos enfants? She was always in the dock, always being cross-examined.

  But I ask the questions. I have the right to ask the questions.

  I’m not timid.

  I’m not scared.

  They see a little old lady, bird bones collapsed together in a fragile heap. I’m inside. I have a voice.

  But she didn’t. Burr, burr, burr.

  Do you have any family, dear? Où est votre mari? Où sont vos enfants?

  She heard the slow lap of water. The keel shuddered and rose into the air. She was sailing back from X-ray.

  Repeat after me: I am not helpless. I am not a victim. I am an old woman. But I am still here.

  ‘Move your eyes if you can hear me.’

  She glanced slightly to the left. Turn to the right. There was something horrible between her legs. Oh God, they have inserted a catheter. Elizabeth Webster suffered from a horror of incontinence. A second childhood of nappies and leaking urine yawned before her. She tried to wriggle free, but this was interpreted as distress. The staff nurse materialised, armed with a disposable syringe, determined to suppress the violent thrashing. Elizabeth shuddered as the needle went in.

  ‘The blood tests are back. The scans are clear. She hasn’t had a heart attack. She hasn’t had a stroke. I don’t quite understand it.’

  The pilot’s boy

  Who now doth crazy go.

  Smells became clearer. Detergent. Bleach. Urine. Overcooked vegetables. Burnt custard. Spilt orange juice. Washing powder. Furniture polish. Her sight remained compromised. Colours were indistinct. White and cream blurred into a glowing mass as if an apparition had heaved itself into her range of perception. She could not see. She could not speak. But she could still smell the odours of the hospital, some rank, some comforting. And when she was conscious, she could hear everything.

  ‘Poor old thing. Has she had a stroke?’

  ‘Better to let them go when they get like that.’

  Elizabeth Webster longed to rise up from her bed of death and hit them. Her anger was transparent, articulate, vivid – like a falling sheet of clear water, but it had no channels in which to flow. She tried to bite her silent tongue and discovered that the nurse had removed her bridge. One half of her mouth gaped empty of teeth. They were taking her apart, like a dilapidated robot, piece by rusting piece.

  She slid back into the dream time and saw an angel, all feathered wings, white robes and androgynous Pre-Raphaelite sweetness, lurking above the waters. As she watched, the angel descended and dipped its long silken sleeves into the pool, stirring the surface into choppy froth. Quick, lift me up. Carry my bier to the brink of the flood. Lay me in the foaming whirlpool before the angel goes. Bring me to the waters she has touched and I shall be healed. I need water, not the Word of God. Bring me water.

  Burr, burr, burr.

  But this was the first clear word that the nurse could discern:

  ‘Water.’

  She at once tipped the baby’s plastic cup on to the old woman’s shrivelled lips. A trail of sweetened dribble ran down her chin. The angel hovered, glimmered, vanished. And the night staff standing there in the wake of its vanishing were left puzzling over her notes.

  ‘She’s been out of intensive care for ages. No change.’

  ‘She hasn’t had a stroke.’

  ‘Dr Broadhurst is coming tomorrow.’

  ‘Oh. It’s heart then, is it? He’s the big white chief in cardiology.’

  Dr Broadhurst was a very ugly man. He had oily thinning hair and heavy glasses. His suit didn’t fit and his baggy white coat was stained with blue strokes from a leaking biro. He flirted with all the nurses. He remembered every name and details about each colleague’s family circumstances. He brought real Swiss chocolates for the entire ward and had a wicked funny leer. Everyone adored him.

  ‘This is Miss Webster. She was brought in on the morning of Tuesday 19 March. She came out of intensive care about a week later and has been here with us ever since. You’ve seen the blood test results? And the scan? She’s anaemic. High blood pressure in the past. Not drastically high now. We don’t really have a firm diagnosis. She’s semi-conscious most of the time. How are you today, Miss Webster?’ The blurred white mass loitering above her clearly did not expect an answer and so she refused to respond. Then the heavy frames and oily clump of hair loomed into view.

  His hands were the first things she saw clearly since the dead halt in her sitting room. They were hideous, deformed. The livid skin was peeled back over the knuckles, the scar tissue spattered with puckered spots of brown. The flesh bunched and shrivelled, as if he had fought off a napalm attack with ungloved fists. He placed one hideous scabbed palm upon her wrist. She flinched at once, as if she had been stabbed. The doctor’s jowly face broke into a huge gap-toothed smile. He raised both tortured hands in a gesture of acceptance and defeat. And then he spoke directly to her, and only to her.

  ‘I know. Horrible, aren’t they? I had skin cancer and this is what severe radiation
burns look like close up. I don’t ever wear gloves. I never hide them. It seems like cheating.’

  He turned his hands over, as if admiring the damage. Elizabeth opened her eyes wide. She wanted to acknowledge this gift of candour. But how? She coiled up all her strength and sent the message to her fading brain. Nod. Smile. She had no idea what happened on her face, which had detached itself from her skeleton weeks ago and now floated at a little distance, like a dancer’s mask. She felt nothing, but the doctor squeezed her fingers in his grotesque and puckered hands, leaned close to her and winked. She caught the flash, magnified in the right lens.

  ‘Put her in a room of her own. Let her sleep as much as she likes. Keep her very quiet. I’ll come and see her again tomorrow.’

  The way back towards movement, sight, speech, the daily task of interpreting the world, had opened up before her.

  She knew when he was there because he always showed her his hands. They were his trademark, his password. She relaxed whenever she saw the browned claws and yellow nails smoothing the pillows, cradling her wrists. She was being held in place by a gentle monster who meant her no harm. He gave her a sequence of daily injections. At the end of a week her sight began to clear. She knew morning from evening. She watched the sunset in the basin’s glass.

  ‘When will you speak to me, Miss Webster? May I call you Elizabeth?’

  She squeezed the burned scabs.

  ‘Thank you. Would you like a chocolate?’

  She tried to shake her head. But nothing moved.

  ‘Did something happen to you on the night you fell ill? Can you remember?’

  She saw her small green rooms, the vase to the left of the television, her little bookcase with all her treasures, her Larousse and three different French dictionaries on the bottom shelf. The television was murmuring gently, wars and rumours of wars. She heard the climbing rose scratching against the window. A quiet night in a cold spring, the damp settling on the closed daffodils, the security lights at the end of the muddy lane illuminating whenever one of her neighbours came home. No. Nothing had happened. There was no reason now why anything should ever happen.

  ‘Dites-moi, chère Madame, pourquoi vous n’êtes pas heureuse.’

  He spoke perfect fluent French. She felt a little shock go through her when she heard the language again. She clutched at her beloved other mother tongue. She watched the late-night films; she tried to ignore the subtitles. She read Le Figaro magazine and she had recently discovered Le Passant Ordinaire to which she still subscribed because, although she loathed the revolutionary politics, she liked the art photographs and the uncompromising articles, spattered with technical terms from psychoanalysis. But since she had retired from the school and abandoned the embarrassment of grammar, the horror of dictation and the evils of free composition, she had not heard the language spoken. She had not heard the rising chimes, neither murdered by recalcitrant children or perfect in the voice of her student assistant, a young graduate from Caen, who wore very expensive suede shoes with pointed toes. She tried to eliminate the vision of those shoes and concentrated hard on the distorted claw, which settled on her wrist.

  ‘Prenez votre temps, Madame.’

  He had noticed the reaction. He was helping her towards the language that she loved; a territory she had once lost for ever now reeled into view. She whispered the words. The burr, burr, burr began, cleared. Her heart filled up like an empty cistern in heavy rain.

  ‘Je ne sais pas,’ she gasped. I don’t know. I am unhappy. I am angry. I am lonely. I am old. I don’t know. Dr Broadhurst sat very still, leering slightly, Patience on a monument, smiling at grief. Je ne sais pas. Je ne sais pas. I don’t know. I don’t know. She said it again and again, for the sheer pleasure of hearing the words of denial and doubt. These were her words. He waited until she fell silent.

  ‘But when you do, you will tell me, won’t you?’ He continued quietly in French. She squeezed the claw, now clamped firmly in her own freckled, bony grasp. The wooded passage through her shadowed mind opened out into fields, filled with purple flowers and summer light. She heard bees amidst the buddleia.

  ‘How long have I been here?’ she whispered.

  ‘Deux mois,’ said Dr Broadhurst, ‘two months.’

  It was summer in a new century. She curled on her side, dreaming time, all ports astern, clear seas before her. Then she realised that the sensation of swaying upon the swell was perfectly legitimate. She was floating on a waterbed, set to a long slow wave. She glared at the doctor’s uncanny repulsive face.

  ‘Mais qui êtes-vous?’ she demanded.

  ‘I’m the messenger,’ he said.

  The worst obstacle she had to overcome in the following weeks was the physiotherapy. A muscular young woman with a grisly dragon tattoo and one earring arrived every day for an hour. She pulled and bent and pummelled. Then she threatened Elizabeth Webster with bedsores if she didn’t make an effort.

  ‘You always get bedsores in recovering coma cases.’

  Elizabeth told her to fuck off in murmured French. The very next day she was whisked away in a wheelchair to the heated pool. Hydrotherapy. At first this seemed like a better bet than the bedroom assaults. She was crammed into a black one-piece bathing costume that was too big for her and hung in baggy folds around her stomach and groin. For the first time she contemplated her bony thighs and slack distended flesh. Her body lay crumpled, hideous, decayed. She had lost over four stone. Young arms lifted her into the steaming water and attached her to a sequence of blue floats. She immediately longed to urinate and grappled with her pelvic muscles. The hated catheter had been removed but she no longer commanded her bowels. It was all too humiliating. She felt the tears rushing down. Get me out. Get me out.

  ‘Is it too hot for you, darling?’

  An enormous hairy man hauled her out again. Had he dislocated both her shoulders?

  ‘She’s crying. She doesn’t like it.’

  ‘Pee! Pee! Pee!’ yelled Elizabeth Webster. Burr, burr, burr.

  ‘What’s the matter, sweetheart?’

  The fake sexy tones enraged her. That’s it. The screaming bladder would probably have triumphed anyway, but she let go on purpose. In the spirit of vindictive aggression she pissed all over the tiles on the side of the tank. To her surprise the hairy physiotherapist simply roared with laughter.

  ‘Bless you, my love. You didn’t want to do it in the pool. Let’s get you over here and hose you down. This always happens. Didn’t they take you to the loo on the way down? Naughty girls. I’ll give them a piece of my mind. Maybe a spanking if they’re feeling lucky and special.’

  He roared at his own camp menaces, propped her up in a white plastic chair above a drain in the tiles, pushed her legs apart and hosed down her stomach and thighs. The thin streak of golden urine mellowed and widened, then vanished. She gasped at the fierce jet of colder water. At first the shock winded her, then oddly enough the force felt pleasant, even suggestive. She wriggled against the pointed torrent.

  ‘That’s better now! Back in the pool!’

  He picked her up as if she were a bunch of weightless sticks and lowered her gently into the floats. His body smelt of oil and chlorine. All the hair on his chest, back and arms floated independently in the water, which gave every limb a furry aureole. He increased dramatically in size.

  ‘That’s it, darling. Stretch those legs out and pop your head back. You’ll float ever so easily. Close your eyes. That’s it. It’s not even five-foot deep. Like a great big bath. Pretend you’re Cleopatra. She had a bath of asses’ milk, didn’t she? NHS doesn’t quite run to that. Stretch your back. Let your bottom float up. Relax. There we go.’

  She lay peaceful and extended on a nap of bright blue in a room full of hollow echoes. Above her the light exploded against the girders and the opaque glass roof. The silver bar around the tank nudged her elbow. She was hot, cradled, secure, floating in the amniotic fluid. She began to doze off.

  But here he was again, beside he
r in the water, the hairy creature, full of irritating talk.

  ‘Oh do shut up, you fool,’ snapped Elizabeth Webster, all her rusty guns rattling, her voice powerful and abrasive, just as it had once been, billowing out into a nascent rage, addressing the rowdy third form.

  ‘That’s it,’ shrugged the monster, ruffling all the surfaces, apparently not at all offended. ‘Treat me like the blond bimbo that I am!’

  But Miss Webster was laughing. The floats were sliding out from underneath her. Wasted grey wisps of hair stuck slicked to her face and throat. She tried to splash water into his face, had no strength to do so and slithered under. He raised her up. She spat out a mouthful of hot, blue, chlorinated liquid. She still had no teeth in the left side of her mouth and wondered where they were. Yet she was laughing.

  At last she could sit up in her hospital-issue orange floral gown, which buttoned up the front, all the way to her chin, without her head lolling like a dead sunflower. But she still could not walk unaided, so she was placed back in the wheelchair and whisked away down corridors and into lifts. She emerged in bright sunshine. Here were windows opening on to a lawn. Here was an empty desk with a phone and one open file. Here were family photographs on a teak filing cabinet: children on a mountainside frisking like goats in a panorama of green and blue. A standard lamp with a wooden base. Green carpets, no artworks. A large carton of Swiss chocolates. And here was the doctor with the mutilated hands.

  He waited until she had completed her inspection. He watched her assessing the sunshine in the gardens. He took his time. So did she.

  ‘Will you talk to me now?’ he asked quietly.

  She looked carefully at his hands, which were, as always, placed like a gauntlet on the desk before him.

  ‘Have I had any visitors?’

  She was not sure if she had dreamed Dr Brody and the vicar.